A long time ago, the King of France sent a renowned troop of soldiers to put an end to some never-ending feuds in the New World.
Aboard one of the ships he sent was a German baron whose reputation had been tarnished by a string of mischievous deeds. The baron’s misfortunes had convinced him that it was time to go abroad and be forgotten for a while.
It took thirteen long weeks to finally cross the ocean. Aboard the ship, confined between the slipway and the bridge, tensions were simmering among the soldiers. And when they opened the scuttle, a cold wind left them feverish. They all wanted to touch land. With the soldiers in this febrile state, the Captain of l’Aigle d’Or decided on a moorage in front of l’Île aux Coudres because the winds were making a random and dangerous adventure of the passage.
Maddened by this opposition, Johann Von Hakken became consumed by rage and picked up his sword, sealing the fate of the lieutenant of the ship, a man who had been known for his moderation.
To this day, it’s still being said that Von Hakken got away on an Indian canoe, aiming for l’Île-aux-Sorciers pursued by a bigger boat full of very angry soldiers and seamen.
Von Hakken was rescued by the sorcerer of the island. In a generous gesture, the sorcerer covered the outlaw with a fine blue powder that had the power to make him invisible to his pursuers.
Time passed. In Québec, everyone thought Van Hakken was dead, eaten alive by wolves or other beasts. Others thought he had fled by the narrow paths leading to New England.
But Von Hakken, now going by the name Jean de la Hache, was still very much alive, living on his adopted island. He had become a sort of handyman to the sorcerer, doing all kind of tasks from gathering dry wood to picking medicinal plants. December was coming, and our baron had became a shadow of himself.
The Saint-Lawrence river was barely frozen when Jean de la Hache, who could not stand living one more day in this indignation, attempted to cross to the coast of Beaupré, hoping to find a place to hide in the high mountains standing before the horizon.
Unfortunately, the poor man had no idea of the racking brought by the tide twice a day. And the inevitable happened: in the middle of the Panage du Nord, the thin ice under his feet broke in a sinister way. The River gulped him up rapidly, and the darkness of death embraced him in its cold arms.
The man was about to die.
But once again, he cheated death. Well, not exactly.
The sorcerer, who knew all along about the attempt of his escape, had something else in mind. He fished the man from the icy waters, stared at him with a long cold glare and proposed a deal that would give the dying man freedom in a forest that would be his own and named after his birth land: the Black Forest. In exchange – after all, a deal’s a deal – Jean de la Hache would have to give the Sorcerer his mortal coil.
Since that terrible night, three hundred years ago, when he accepted the deal with the sorcerer, the ghost of Johann Von Hakken roams the woods of the Black Forest, raging among the trees, working endlessly on a passage that could set him free of Mont-Saint-Anne and return him to the island to get his old body back and head back to the Old World, which he saw in his mind as being more and more welcoming as time went by.
But Jean de la Hache was wrong. He was not even able to reach the coast of the river. Each time he got to the edge of the Black Forest, he was thrown back to its highest peak, just like that, by magic.
Like a prisoner, the ghost hunts in the woods. People from every generation claim to have felt his presence in the forest. Again last summer, he marked out three slopes on Mont-Saint-Anne: Triumph, Munster and Schnell. Toponyms, reminding him of the places of his childhood.
But the baron Johann Von Hakken is a stubborn ghost; nobody knows how, but he discovered that there is a way to get rid of the sorcerer’s curse: to ride astride the shoulders of the one who, at exactly noon when the wind is blowing from the North, will look from the top of the mountain directly to the west.
If you are that person, hold on tight because Von Hakken will bring you exactly where he wants to, absolutely and without a shadow of doubt.
© Eve Boissonnault 2003